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This morning’s top “you can’t make this stuff up” entry from the folks on Right Wing Avenue has to be this post from “The Locker Room” blog. In it, the author slams mail-in voting as part of a nefarious liberal plot to promote fraud and end the secret ballot.

Mind you, these claims come from one of the very groups that championed North Carolina’s “Monster” voter suppression law even as progressive critics were repeatedly blasting that law’s one-sided and blatantly partisan provisions to make voting more complicated and difficult for everyone except absentee, mail-in voters.

In other words: The Pope people would do well to get their stories straight. If they are really worried about fraud in mail-in voting, they might want to think about taking a look at the laws in their home state. Of course, to do that might actually lead to a lower turnout amongst the people that the Pope people want to vote — i.e. older, wealthy and white voters.

Caring and thinking North Carolinians should utter a word of thanks today to some dedicated advocates and activists working to make sure that all who wish to vote can do so. Of particular note are:

1) The legal experts at the UNC Center for Civil Rights, which is hosting a national voter protection hotline today. As the group noted in a news release yesterday:

UNC School of Law students, with other community volunteers, are staffing a toll-free, non-partisan hotline to answer voter questions on Election Day, Tuesday November 4th, as part of Election Protection, a national voter advocacy effort. Voters can call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) or 1-888-VE-Y VOTA (888-839-8682) with questions about their rights and the voting process….This November is the first major election after the passage of North Carolina House Bill 589, which significantly changed the voting laws in North Carolina. The Election Protection Hotline will provide resources to support voters at the polling place. Voters can call the Hotline to report any problems they encounter or witness at the polls, verify their registration status, or find their polling location.

and, 2) the student activists at Ignite NC. This is from a release that group distributed this morning: Read More

If you encountered a frustratingly long line at your polling place this morning (or do so later today), you can thank the current General Assembly and governor for the frustration. There are lots of reasons that North Carolina’s new “Monster Voting Law” is making voting more difficult in our state and thereby discouraging participation, but here is an especially pernicious one that’s been under-reported and that’s contributing mightily to the long lines like the one I encountered this morning: the end of “straight ticket” voting.

In 2012, 2.5 million North Carolinians cast a straight ticket ballot. Think about that. On a ballot like the one I wrestled with for several minutes this morning, painstakingly filling in the bubbles with a silly ballpoint pen (as an aside, can’t we figure out something better and easier than a bunch of worn-out Bic pens?), the time loss was probably at least five to seven minutes for anyone who voted in every partisan race. Now multiply 2.5 million times and you get hundreds of thousands of hours added to waiting times across the state. Add to this, the thousands of people who just give up and, well, you get the idea.

The bottom line: Longer, unnecessary waits and, you can be sure, great satisfaction amongst those who would cynically depress the vote in order to manipulate the results. As election watchdog Bob Hall noted in an op-ed several weeks back:

The tip-off of this exclusionary strategy, and indeed the whole rationale behind the sweeping changes to state election law, comes from statements by Jack Hawke, a former NC GOP chair, former president of the Civitas Institute, and former campaign manager for Pat McCrory. After the Democrats’ 2008 victory, Hawke wrote a column for the Carolina Journal explaining why the McCrory campaign fell short that year. Blame the straight ticket and early voting, he said. Read More

There’s still significant hope that North Carolina’s new voter suppression laws will eventually be sent to the trash bin where they belong — either by the courts, future state leaders or both. For now, however, North Carolinians will have to make do under the current rigged regime if they want to make their voices heard.

So, this means the deadline to register for the November 4 election is TOMORROW — October 10.

Greensboro News & Record editorial writer Doug Clark is on the money with this column praising this week’s Fourth Circuit decision to enjoin two key voter suppression laws enacted by North Carolina’s current political leaders:

The court noted the propriety of applying “the totality of circumstances” to its analysis. In this case, the circumstances included waiting for the Supreme Court to strike down preclearance requirements under the Voting Rights Act last year before the legislature rolled out its bill in all its many parts.

“By inspecting the different parts of House Bill 589 as if they existed in a vacuum, the district court failed to consider the sum of those parts and their cumulative effect on minority access to the ballot box,” Wynn wrote for the court.

Also relevant is the history of racial discrimination in North Carolina’s voting past.

The court drew an obvious conclusion:

“The election laws in North Carolina prior to House Bill 589’s enactment encouraged participation by qualified voters. But the challenged House Bill 589 provisions stripped them away….”

The changes were partisan weapons, no less than gerrymandered redistricting. Why anyone would pretend otherwise is beyond me.

I don’t know how it will come out eventually, but I wish North Carolina would take steps to encourage more voting, not discourage it.